Silver Peak today upgraded the software for its WAN appliance to handle automated optimization for TCP and non-TCP traffic, 512,000 simultaneous connections for 10 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) infrastructures and support for a bunch of common hypervisors.

The need for a dedicated physical appliance to handle WAN optimization tasks, in many cases, is a thing of the past, according to experts who participated in a panel discussion Tuesday at Interop in Las Vegas.

Anyone who has endured the painful wait of a slow-loading application is familiar with the frustration and lost productivity that follows. That's the problem that motivated Riverbed and Akamai to join forces for a new SaaS acceleration offering, with the objective of resolving SaaS application performance issues that were previously untouchable.

After watching customers continually download and install one of the vendor's free, limited products from the company website, Silver Peak CEO Rick Tinsley was interested to see how they would respond to the same access to its more advanced products.

Distribution Management Inc. bought F5's Big-IP Gateway to handle WAN optimization, but it turns out the platform solved a string of problems that cropped up when the company deployed VMware virtual desktop infrastructure, too.

How Swedish agribusiness Lantmännen cultivated a more cost-effective infrastructure.